Category: Methods

Some of the Web’s Best Advice on Preventing Survey Bias With the advent of DIY survey programs like Survey Monkey and Google Surveys, market research is becoming more democratized. Marketers, sales people, and amateur market researchers now have massive base sizes at their disposal to produce the data they need (or want). Further, as market […]

The Role of Watson and Artificial Intelligence in Market Research IBM’s Watson and artificial intelligence in general will play a large role in the market research field. In order to better understand the role of IBM Watson and artificial intelligence (AI) in the market research profession, we should first spend a few minutes understanding how […]

This Initiative Isn’t Working Like We Thought: The Problem of Cannibalization One of the mistakes businesses make is thinking about new initiative launches in a silo. As a result, they sub-optimize the incremental growth the new product can deliver. Even if the consumer insights manager is an expert on the “Three A’s” of trial, sometimes […]

Statistical Significance: What Do Those Little Letters Mean? I don’t pretend to be a statistics expert. In all honesty, if you came to this post looking for how to calculate statistical significance, you would be much better served here, or here, or here. However, if you were trying to figure out what those little letters […]

Krisis: My Favorite Kind of Focus Groups Krisis focus groups are meant to encourage conflict. This, as I have mentioned before, is the reason why they are my favorite kind of focus group. “Krisis” is Ipsos’ brand name for version of debate-style or conflict-style qualitative research. Instead of using focus groups to find commonality or […]

Three Awesome, Nielsen, Quantitative Research Capabilities That are Not Named “Answers” When you hear the name Nielsen, or ACNielsen, you probably think about TV ratings. I take that back. 90% of you will think of TV ratings, and the shopper insights managers will think POS Scanning and Homescan Panel. Either way, the Nielsen company offers a […]

Three Barriers to Accepting Social Media Research Methods A common question I get from friends and mentees in the market research industry is, “Why are social media research methods so hard for my organization to adopt?” This is a good question. Especially as more and more social media research companies emerge. In a world with slick, […]

Three of Our Favorite Ways to Get Survey Data Quickly and Affordably Sometimes you just need survey data. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just need the data. Spending two weeks waiting for a Purchase Order and another four-to-six weeks to get the survey data back isn’t always possible. Wouldn’t it be great if there […]

Navigating the Politics of Concept Testing There is nothing in the world of market research so deceptively complicated and political as concept testing. This can be especially frustrating because a concept test should be one of the most straight-forward and elegantly simple pieces of research a market researcher or insights manager has to field. I […]

Why Driving Trial Matters So Much in Volume Forecasting If you work in the CPG world long enough, you will be exposed to volume forecasting. Volume forecasting is a kind of quantitative analysis that predicts new product sales in years 1-2 of launch. Unless your company does volume forecasting in-house, you are likely familiar with […]